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Using Portable HD with Mac

CommonMan

CommonMan

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 27, 2006
140
0
Midwest
I just bought a portable HD (hi speed usb 2.0). I plugged it in and it was immediately recognized but I was unable to write to it or copy data to it.
I think it is formated for a PC but the package says it works with Mac OSX.

I tried to use disk utilities to format it for the mac but the choice in the field remained grey and I could not do anything with the disk utilities application.

Can anyone make a suggestion as to how I can get this thing to work. I have another portable HD that works fine in both my PC and my Mac.
 
Right mouse click on the drive in disk utility doesn't give you the option to format for mac?
 
Nothing works

OK - I go to disk utility and selected the portable drive (which at least shows up on the desk top and in the disk utility).

In the Fields "Volume Format" and "name" (which are supposed to have options I can select) there is only gray lettering (meaning I cannot select it) in these fields.

In "Volume Format" is Mac os extended (journaled)

In "Name" is Simpledrive, which is the name given by the factory to the HD (it is a portable HD made by SimpleTech), however these are in grey print as opposed to black print and cannot be selected.

Should I plug it into my PC and re-format it that way?
 
Heres what INFO says

I see the disk in disk manager and I clicked on INFO. Here is what I got.
I'm going to try and format the HD to FAT32 using my old PC. I actually tired this already last night but Widows failed. I will try doing it in DOS, if I can remember.


Name : SimpleDrive
Type : Volume

Disk Identifier : disk2s1
Mount Point : /Volumes/SimpleDrive
File System : Winows NT Filesystem
Connection Bus : USB
IO Content : Windows_NTFS
Writable : No
Capacity : 111.8 GB (120,031,478,784 Bytes)
Free Space : 111.7 GB (119,960,240,128 Bytes)
Used : 67.9 MB (71,238,144 Bytes)
Number of Files : 32
Number of Folders : 0
Permissions Enabled : Yes
Can Turn Permissions Off : No
Can Repair Permissions : No
Can Be Verified : No
Can Be Repaired : No
Can Be Formatted : No
Bootable : No
Supports Journaling : No
Journaled : No
Disk Number : 2
Partition Number : 1
 
Used DOS

I used dos to format the HD on the PC but I did not know how to specify FAT32, I just formated it.

It still does not work with the MAC!

HELP!
 
No, they did not provide anything with it and their website is crap.
I'm taking the drive back. It's a peice of crap. They should not have said it would work with a Mac on the package. I am angry at myself for spending so much time on the SimpleTech Portable Hard Drive!:mad:
 
There's nothing wrong with this drive, except its formatting. It's currently formatted with Windows' NTFS filesystem, which OS X can only read, not write. Simply re-partition it (GUID style, if you have an Intel machine or Apple Partition Map if it's PowerPC) with one HFS+ partition and it'll work perfectly. This can be done in Disk Utility on OS X.
 
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